My name is Richard McBride and I have ALS. I was diagnosed in November 2012 at 57 years of age. This blog will cover my journey. Just remember, I am living with ALS, not dying from it.

Sunday, 16 August 2015

Time To Think

One of the risks of having time alone is that I start to think about things. This never has a good outcome. As Katherine says, I need to learn to put this stuff down and focus elsewhere. It seems impossible for me to do that, it just keeps coming back. I try to shift my mind, reading statuses on Facebook, reading the news online, sometimes even going so far as to turn on the TV to watch a documentary; there are plenty of them.

Still, if I am alone and idle, this is where my mind goes. It starts with a simple, shallow resting examination of my thoughts and feelings. I ask myself what is going on in my emotional center. There I discover a mild anger at myself, or possibly at everything in general. It's the kind of anger I usually use to get myself moving, perhaps not so much anger as irritation at my own self-indulgence. "Get up. Get moving. Do something!" I take that emotion, using it to fuel the next step needed in my morning process, usually the energy needed to finish getting dressed or to transfer to my wheelchair.

But if I take a few minutes and wander a bit deeper into my emotional consciousness, I discover another, more solid, underlying emotion, like bedrock beneath gravel, hard, solid, unyielding. This deeper emotion, not really all that deep, is an unremitting sadness. When I strip away the surface of my emotional landscape, this is what lies beneath, that sense of sorrow over what is happening, what has happened, what will happen.

I can only scratch at the surface of this bedrock. It goes deep, this sadness. Perhaps it has always underlain me, only now it has purpose, reason to be there. Even as I poke and push at it, there are only light incursions beyond the surface. Without some sort of chemical release of inhibition, it remains almost always immutable, unyielding, a maudlin force seeking to do nothing but remain.

There is but one way to deal with this substrate of sorrow and sadness. It is to ignore it, to move along finding as much joy and happiness as is possible above this sub-tyranny. That's what happens when I stay at the surface, not going too deep. I can use my emotions to get me moving. Once I am moving, things improve, mostly, except when I have time to think.